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Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form

Abraham Akkermana
a
Department of Geography, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

To cite this Article Akkerman, Abraham(2009) 'Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form', Ethics,
Place & Environment, 12: 2, 205 — 218
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 Ethics, Place and Environment
Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2009, 205–218

Urban Void and the Deconstruction of

Neo-Platonic City-Form
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ABRAHAM AKKERMAN
Department of Geography, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

ABSTRACT Urban void sometimes amplifies alienation within urban space, and thus leads the way
to the human craving for authenticity. Juxtaposing urban void with the conventional notion of
urban objects, furthermore, conforms to Nietzsche’s distinction between Dionysian and
Apollonian deportment. The Apollonian is at the founding of the Platonic myth of the Ideal
City and its modern descendant, the myth of the Rational City. Modern urban planning has been
object-directed and, consistent with the historical trend since the Renaissance, has become a
constituent of a Neo-Platonic mythology that insists on forging a city as an urban technological
artifact. Most existing urban parks and squares, as well as suburban gardens, within this
approach, only augment the subordinate standing of urban voids. Yet the significance of urban
void, as the unplanned place that represents the pre-rational, the genuine and the unadulterated,
ought to lead to its re-introduction into city-form as a conduit for self-reflection and authenticity.
Recognizing urban void for its significance may reintroduce an important Dionysian feature into
city-form, leading to deliberate carving of authentic urban spaces.

Urban Void and City-Form

Void is usually considered as the absence of constructs within a defined space.
In urban architecture and design, void is also thought of as the spatial medium into
which artifacts are projected, within which they are displayed, distributed, ordered or
disordered. Urban void, however, has never been defined. Some recent approaches
perceive urban void as tantamount to dearth of buildings or other purposeful objects
within an urban recess. In the urban periphery, occasionally, such an outlook offers
possibilities for inclusion of natural elements like water, air, sun, sky and green space
(GAAGA, 2008). Of specific significance, however, is an urban recess where people
are absent. It is this kind of urban void that offers a deportment of meaninglessness.
Such is the bareness of the streetscape, vividly described in The Castle, an
unfinished novel by Franz Kafka. By exuding vacuous monotony through imposed
urban regimentation and the absence of people, the streetscape, itself complete and

Correspondence Address: Abraham Akkerman, Department of Geography and Planning, University of

Saskatchewan, 117 Science Place, Saskatoon, SK, Canada S7N 5C8. Email: avi.akkerman@usask.ca

1366-879X Print/1469-6703 Online/09/020205–14 ß 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13668790902863416
 206 A. Akkerman

flawless in its entirety, becomes a conduit of self-awareness to an individual’s

estrangement:

At every turn K. expected the road to double back to the Castle, and only
because of the expectation did he go on; he was flatly unwilling, tired as he was,
to leave the street, and he was also amazed at the length of the village, which
seemed to have no end; again and again the same little houses, and frost-bound
window-panes and snow and the entire absence of human beings [. . .]. (Kafka,
1919/1992, p. 17)
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Salient in The Castle is the frame of mind associated with urban void of the
streetscape: dread and utter alienation. Void and the perpetual incompleteness in the
streetscape are absurdly entrenched in the meaningless perfection of a completed
built form, within which the only pure realization is alienation itself.
K., the novel’s hero, is a land-surveyor who never attains his goal of reaching the
town’s Castle where the chief bureaucrat resides, just as Kafka himself never
completes his novel. The town, with its streets leading to nowhere, and the Castle,
with its bureaucrats accessible to none, emerge in their entirety as absurd.
Meaninglessness is inherent in the process itself behind the layout of streets and of
the entire town in Kafka’s novel. Once all has been measured and once the town’s
layout has been completed, the land-surveyor, the foremost professional who since
antiquity has measured property lots and laid out new towns, has no reason to stay
in this town. He forever leaves the towns of his residence behind, perpetually having
to move from one territory to another to practice his profession of perfection:

You’ve been taken as Land Surveyor, as you say, but, unfortunately, we have
no need for a Land Surveyor. There wouldn’t be the least use for one here.
The frontiers of our little state are marked out and all officially recorded. So
what should we do with a Land Surveyor? (Kafka, 1919/1992, p. 61)

Modern urban design, often criticized for introducing desolate perfection in

city-form (e.g. Jacobs, 1961, pp. 17–22), appears as an affirmation of Kafka’s
foretelling at the turn of the twentieth century. Embodied in modern urban design, in
this view, is a tragic distortion in city-form that, through attempts at urban
perfection, proclaimed as serving communal affinity, has become conducive mainly
to amplify estrangement (cf. Kidder, 2008).

Urban Decay as the Converse of Urban Perfection

To Helen Armstrong, urban perfection has a contrasting facet in the city: it is urban
decay, a ‘landscape of contempt’. Armstrong considers urban landscapes of
contempt as the most foundational, albeit overlooked, urban voids in the
contemporary metropolis. On the one hand, the dereliction of urban decay to
Armstrong expresses passage of time—not as an object frozen in time, but as a living,
organic continuum of change. And as bizarre, unsightly voids, the various instances
of urban decay manifest a peculiar kind of the subconscious, as if reiterating ‘Freud’s
argument that the power of the uncanny place of dereliction is that it ought to
 Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form 207

remain hidden; [yet it] keeps coming to light’ (Armstrong, 2006). Urban decay, seen
as the urban subconscious, is the city’s forgotten side, the other, often
unacknowledged face of the city.
As a landscape of contempt, urban decay is a smudge of delinquency and neglect,
but to Jean-Paul Sartre, it is also the city’s mark of defiance against the enforcement
of rationality and expectedness. Sartre perceives the place of urban decay as a refuge
where authenticity has won over the fraud of urban regimentation, the one place that
does not hide ugliness and disgust, but displays them as pure qualities:

I am on the curb of the Rue Paradis, beside the last lamp-post. The asphalt
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ribbon breaks off sharply. Darkness and mud are on the other side of the street.
I cross the Rue Paradis. I put my right foot in a puddle of water, my sock is
soaked through; my walk begins. [. . .] I am cold, my ears hurt; they must be all
red. But I no longer feel myself; I am won by the purity surrounding me;
nothing is alive, the wind whistles, the straight lines flee in the night.
The Boulevard Noir does not have the indecent look of bourgeois streets,
offering their regrets to the passers-by. No-one has bothered to adorn it: it is
simply the reverse side. [. . .] The town has forgotten it. Sometimes a great mud-
coloured truck thunders across it at top speed. No one even commits any
murders here; want of assassins and victims. [. . .] The Nausea has stayed down
here, in the yellow light. I am happy [. . .]. (Sartre, 1938/1959, pp. 24–26)

The Nausea of urban decay is not a mere feeling; it too is a frame of

mind—presented by Sartre as the one authentic disposition associated with the city.
Both examples of urban void, the one as a fraudulent attempt at perfection, the
other as an authentic landscape of contempt, have one trait in common: they both
imply contradiction between a plan and its aftermath. The paradox of incessant
promises of perfection in a plan, on the background of absurdity and contempt
inherent in aspects of actual city-form, comes to an expression through alienation
and the subsequent self-reflection of the urban dweller.

The City in a Platonic Reflection of Nature and Man

Urban constructs and urban voids, as the two contrasting facets of city-form, are not
mutually exclusive. They match up very well with what Friedrich Nietzsche showed
almost two centuries ago as being two impulses of the human psyche in classical
Greek art: one corresponding to spatial traits, the other reflecting temporal
deportment. He called the two impulses the Apollonian and the Dionysian,
respectively. The spatial attributes of the human temperament, epitomized by
Apollo, the god of colonies and of city-walls, correspond to harmony, order, reason,
certainty and stability. Capriciousness and turbulence, expressive of Dionysus, the
bisexual god of wine, on the other hand animate euphoric and rapturous attributes
of the human character, involving unpredictable outbursts tempered by intervals of
quiet (Zeitlin, 1982). It is only a small conceptual step to relate the mind’s spatial
disposition to a planned shelter and its temporal outlook to raw nature and
open space.
 208 A. Akkerman

It is from within the tension between the turbulence and uncertainty of nature’s
ferocity, and the firmness and security of a human-made shell, that the intellectual
quandary of uniformity amid diversity, and of permanence amid change, arose.
It was Plato who, for the very first time in the history of the West, sought a
conceptual structure within which the question of universality within variety, and
constancy within change, could be addressed. The Platonic Socrates, through the
literary medium of a dramatic dialogue, gives ground to the notion that contingent
objects in the empirical world of daily experience are but flawed exemplars of their
ideal prototypes, the Forms. Even as a theatrical figure, Socrates, a mason’s son,
could hardly be surpassed by any other persona to represent the architectural bond
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inherent in the notion of Forms. It is in the course of the Socratic argumentations

that the affinity between the concept of an architectural model and Plato’s Theory of
Forms becomes apparent. Centuries after Plato, the resemblance between Forms,
and plans or models was not lost on Cicero when he translated some of the Platonic
dialogues into Latin.1 This design link was made later unequivocal by the foremost
theologian and philosopher of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican friar, in
his Quaestiones Quodlibetales.2
In all Plato’s works, the contemplation of Forms becomes particularly critical
when aimed at the most momentous of man-made artifacts: the city. The polis—the
city or city-state, is among concerns of recurring Platonic inquiry, and, in addition to
nature and cosmos—the first Platonic context of Forms—the polis sets the other
Platonic context, that of human beings. Plato’s Forms as perfect models or
prototypes are particularly significant in regard to one fundamental urban notion:
the Ideal City.
According to Plato, the Ideal City is the mirror image of, as well as a universal
imprint within, the human soul. On Plato’s view, the Ideal City, as a shared concept,
is carved in the souls of all humans. The imprint of the human soul, correspondingly,
constitutes the social traits of the Ideal City, and as a mental archetype common to
all humanity, the Ideal City is the model image according to which humans also
ultimately, in Plato’s view, should design their cities. As a foundational tenet, the
Ideal City, therefore, is both a mental image as well as a universally shared allegory.
Since the Ideal City is an inborn paradigm, collectively shared by all humanity, as
well as a mirror of the human soul, it is subject to introspection (Moreau, 1986, pp.
85–86). In Jung’s psychoanalysis universal allegories are referred to as myths.3 It is
through its universal dispensation throughout all humanity that the Myth of the
Ideal City had become a pivotal element in the evolution of the city, and in the
continuing, mutual feedback between nature, the built environment and mind.
City-form—the configuration of urban spaces and edifices as the built environ-
ment within which much of humanity has resided since the dawn of civilization—is in
this view associated with the mental notion of the Ideal City. It is also in this context
that Nietzsche’s supposition of the Apollonian and Dionysian character of Greek
art, as masculine and feminine impulses, is instructive. In his psychoanalytic theory
Carl Jung carried the notion of the two impulses toward universality, arguing that all
men carry within their subconscious an archetypal feminine symbolism, the Anima,
while all women carry within their subconscious a correspondingly opposite
masculine symbolism, the Animus (Jung, 1911/1953). The Myth of the Ideal City
 Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form 209

appears as masculine, deeply intertwined in its feminine counterpart representing

nature: the Myth of the Garden, or the Void.

Philosophical Urbanism: From Urban Blueprints to Mental Imprints

Both in the Bible and in early Greek mythology, the world had been formless and
void at its very beginning.4 To the Psalmist, Void is the medium through which he
connects with the divine: ‘Out of the depths I cry to thee’. A commensurate feeling
seems to be conveyed by such amorphous spaces as the Zen rock garden in Ryôan-Ji,
Kyoto (McGovern, 2004).
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To the extent that void is the absence in a space of purposely manufactured

artifacts it is associated also with nature, or unstructured botanical sites. Such a site
is the sacrosanct space of the Garden in the Book of Genesis. Its purity is expressed in
primeval interactions within the environment and in guileless human relations. First
and foremost among these is equitable sharing in the environment as the underlying
mode of human existence.
But it is the very same innocent altruism that also leads to the commission of the
original sin—sharing in the Garden’s Forbidden Fruit. The ensuing punishment—
expulsion from the Garden and human existence cast into the depths of struggle for
survival—appear as the inevitable outcome. The consequent construction of shelter
by humans, a house and a city, are, in the Bible, both the outcome of the primordial
sin, as well as a twig from the formless, saintly place.
If we are to follow Nietzsche and Jung’s subsequent theory of the collective
subconscious, then the nascent archetype from which the myths of the Garden and
the Ideal City emerge is the Earthmother.5 The Myth of the Garden is the
culmination, possibly at the turn of the late Stone Age (c. 50,000 BCE in the Fertile
Crescent) of the feminine archetype of the Earthmother. Symbolizing human
fertility, the female gatherers of fruits and vegetables become the Garden’s
emissaries. The emergence of the Myth of the Ideal City occurs more recently,
evolving from the Earthmother, initially as a primal masculine allegory of the
Citadel. Hunters forming pacts to fend off external attack as well as to suppress
internal mutiny, become the first overlords, the builders of citadels and forts (Vico,
1744/1968). The paradigm of the Citadel unfolds in early civilization into the Myth
of the Ideal City, and following the first prehistoric settlements, sometime after
20,000 BCE, the Ideal City becomes the masculine consort of the seraphic Garden.
Evolving from the Earthmother archetype, both myths have been mutating and, to
this very day, also shaping their built environment in a dynamic feedback process
(Akkerman, 2002).
Voids and constructs within city-form, then, ought to be seen in the larger context
of mind within its built environment. A stand regarding mind’s dispositions within
city-form has been the premise that the built environment and minds within it are a
single hybrid in an ongoing formative interaction. The hybrid composite of minds
and the city forges a single context to concepts and to urban voids and edifices, in a
mutual impact upon each other. In this view, the mind–city composite evolves
through its foundational component: the Myth of the Ideal City. City-form mutates
when the Myth of the Ideal City is brought to bear upon it, while the Myth
of the Ideal City transforms itself in the same feedback process when a new
 210 A. Akkerman

city-form emerges. This outlook, referred to as philosophical urbanism, conceives of

the spatio-temporal hybrid, within which thought and city-form continually modify
one another and mutate, as spanning over geographical space and historical time
(Akkerman, 2006). In the words of Walter Benjamin, the same process led to
twentieth century city-form:

[. . .] the dream in which every epoch sees in images the epoch that follows, the
latter appears wedded to elements of ur-history [. . .]. Its experiences, which
have their storage place in the unconscious of the collective, produce, in their
interpenetration with the new, the utopia that has left its trace behind in a
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thousand configurations [. . .]. (Benjamin, 1972, pp. 46–47, quoted in Buck-

Morrs, 1990, p. 114)

The origin of the mind–city composite, thus, seems to be traceable to the mutual
relationship between nature’s peril and a thought about, or a mental image of, a
shelter against it. Through antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a model
from clay or a waxen tablet was the physical likeness of such a shelter—a house, or a
walled or otherwise protected settlement. It could have been through the use of clay
and waxen tablets that the Theory of Forms had been forged by Plato. But all the
same, Platonism, too, has left its mark over time on the concepts of architectural or
planning models, and on the very notion of a blueprint.6 To be sure, blueprints or
models have two attributes of Platonic Forms as their own. The one is their static
feature: both Platonic Forms and architectural blueprints are beyond temporal
vacillation; a blueprint does not possess dynamic features, and once changed, is
simply a blueprint different from the original. The second common feature to Forms
and blueprints is their remoteness. Platonic Forms are transcendent; they are beyond
empirical reality even though reality is determined in accordance with them.
As articulated images aimed to specifically design a particular space or object,
blueprints, too, are not part of such a designed space or an object but surely
determine it.
As opposed to a designed space or object, void—as an unstructured niche or a
confined absence of objects—can be launched or established by neither Forms nor
blueprints. This implicit attitude to void in the perceptual–cerebral origin of Platonic
Forms continually projects itself back onto the spatio-temporal composite of
mind–city through the choice of one specific Form: the Ideal City. It is this very
attitude that reflects on the manner in which urban void has been treated, or
mistreated, throughout much of urban history.
The charge that Forms are unable to capture the dynamics of change in empirical
objects (e.g. Fine, 1993, pp. 94–96, 203–224) stems from their attribute as detached,
remote ideals transcending time—a criticism brought up already by Aristotle. This
too alludes to the inability of Platonic Forms to encompass void (cf. Huggett, 1999,
pp. 72–84). Yet in spite of the suggestion that architecture was Plato’s inspiration, if
not a source, the Aristotelian criticism aimed at the Theory of Forms has not
extended onto architecture or urban design (Farness, 1988). Particularly, until the
recent emergence of deconstruction in architecture, epistemology of the architectural
or the design blueprint has not been questioned.
 Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form 211

A groundplan, an elevation or a section of a proposed artifact, of course,

constitutes an ideal form as well. A designer’s model is usually an articulated thought
of a perfect object or site. Yet exact correspondence between a blueprint and a
constructed site holds, at best, in a single instance only, the instance of the site’s
completion according to the plan. A fundamental gap exists between a blueprint and
its corresponding object in reality, however, and this gap increases as time passes
from the moment of the object’s completion. The blueprint’s creator, the designer, is
aware of the gap, yet it is precisely this static, ideal blueprint—whether as a model or
a drawing—that commonly constitutes the condition of bringing an artifact into
existence. From the moment of its completion according to the blueprint, an object
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or a site undergoes a process of ageing and decay. No blueprint, nor Platonic Form,
can capture this. Platonic Forms, much as blueprints, are the scheme through which
objects or artifacts are cast into reality, but once objects become reality, neither
Forms nor blueprints are capable of addressing changes occurring to them. Change,
void and time are intertwined, not least because they are outside of the realm of
Forms and blueprints.

The Myth of the Grand Designer and Contemporary City-Form

In virtually all twentieth century urban master plans, most if not all urban features
convey predictability in the urban environment; in these ideal city blueprints there is
very little room for surprises to occur within the planned city-form. Ominously, in
Book V of his Laws Plato fashions the citizens of his Ideal City as if they were made
‘out of waxwork’ (parag. 746); as if the Platonic Theory of Forms sieved through to
the planned city of modernity, mechanization of city-form and automatism in human
behavior have become part and parcel of modernity.
In Plato’s social blueprint of the Ideal City, obedience of the crowd is matched by
control exerted by the philosopher-king. In the Platonic mythology the latter is seen
as analogous to the demiurge, or the Grand Designer.7 The myth of the Grand
Designer shows through monumental construction projects throughout history.
Ostentatious urban projects of Georges-Eugene Hausmann in Paris and Robert
Moses in New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century closely express
the same mythology. Aimed at facilitating urban transportation and public health, as
well as safety and security, projects such as those of Hausmann and Moses were the
aspiration for a surprise-free city, where urban beauty was seen in the service of
expectedness, security and crowd control. The requisite demolition of much of the
medieval core of Paris by Hausmann or destruction of urban neighborhoods in
the Bronx by Moses, as pointed out by Ada Louise Huxtable (2007), were seen at the
time, and are seen in some quarters still today, as a price to be paid, or as outright
badges of honor for progress.
It is precisely through urban megastructures, such as those by Haussmann and
Moses, that twentieth century urban planning lent a helping hand in mechanizing,
and thus also automating, human behavior within city-form. Inspired more by
Hausmann’s colossal new streetscapes than perturbed by the demise of the historic
center of Paris, urban planning in the early twentieth century reiterated Platonic
notions in monumental plans according to which cities were built or rebuilt: Walter
Griffin’s winning Ideal City design for Canberra—now recognized both for its
 212 A. Akkerman

outstanding drawings as well as its failure to address actual planning issues

(Freestone, 1998); the reconstruction of Chicago following Daniel Burnham’s plan—
later dubbed as one ‘for the rich by the rich’ (Bess, 1990). Frank Lloyd Wright’s
sprawling, orthogonal plan of Broadacre City (1932), or the far-fetched design of Le
Corbusier’s Radiant City (1935) suggest a similar heroic pedigree, where the vast task
of moving enormous crowds back and forth between their places of residence and
their places of work yields the necessity for mechanized mass transportation as an
overarching consideration. As access to jobs, shopping, arts and entertainment,
increasingly during the twentieth century, became controlled by mechanized and
automated city-form, at the century’s end Rem Koolhaas came to observe this
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metropolitan aftermath of the Neo-Platonic Ideal City as ‘an addictive machine from
which there is no escape’ (Koolhaas, 1978, 1999). As both Kafka and Sartre show, in
existentialist quarters of Europe during the twentieth century the city came to be
viewed as an inevitable construct of humans, which guarantees their survival—at the
cost of their gradual loss of authenticity.
It is for the same reason that silence, the temporal analog to void, has faded from
contemporary city-form. Motor transportation, furthermore, has become the
epitome of incoherence, if not outright absurd, in the metropolis. Instead of
facilitating access in the city, transportation itself has come to hamper it. Not only
congestion through urban transportation, however, but also other facets of
malfunction in the contemporary city-form are the inadvertent aftermath of what
had been perceived and presented to be an ideal urban blueprint for the Rational
City.
Urban design has explicitly aimed at predictability in city-form not only in the
twentieth century, but ever since the emergence of Renaissance New Towns. It was
René Descartes’ admiring adage of straight, aligned streets that served him as a
paradigm for his principle of clear and distinct ideas, thus in turn laying also the
ground to modern urban planning (Descartes, 1631/1985, p. 109; Akkerman, 2001).
Striving towards the well-functioning ideal of modern science and technology, and in
the image of a rational city-form, ideal plans throughout the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution have adhered to the principle of predictability in science and
surprise-free city-form in urban planning. Much as algorithms and machines, so also
the modern city was to be launched as an apparatus; but against the blueprint for a
well-functioning city, a malfunctioning city-form has emerged, and in the gap
between the myth of the Rational City and the reality of urban incoherence the
candid observer has detected deception:

Modernism’s alchemistic promise—to transform quantity into quality through

abstraction and repetition—has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn’t work.
Its ideas, aesthetics, strategies are finished. Together, all attempts to make a
new beginning have only discredited the idea of a new beginning. A collective
shame in the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater in our understanding
of modernity and modernization. (Koolhaas, 1998)

Post-modern notions of the city have arisen within this milieu through competing
attempts at optimization, projected upon urban infrastructure, building
 Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form 213

construction, or individual behavior. Human authenticity has been lost within this
new urban context as city-form emerging from the spiraling need for crowd control
has come to subordinate its makers:

Since we are not responsible, we have to become irresponsible. In a landscape

of increasing expediency and impermanence, urbanism no longer is or has to be
the most solemn of our decisions; urbanism can lighten up, become a ‘Gay
Science’—‘Lite Urbanism’. What if we simply declare that there is no crisis—
redefine our relationship with the city not as its makers but as its mere subjects,
as its supporters? (Koolhaas, 1998)
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Individuals attempting to optimize their returns from participating in the urban

community, ultimately try to extrude themselves from imposed crowd control and
the corresponding rigidity of city-form. The urban public comprising such
individuals creates, in turn, a run-away discordance: traffic congestion, line-ups,
systemic failures, inadvertent breakdowns or wanton vandalism are the overt
symptoms of the disparity between minds and their built environment. From mere
nuisance in the city of the mid-twentieth century, these manifestations have turned
into defining traits of city-form at the turn of the new century.
In the escalating cycle of cacophony, individuals focus on ever-new means at
extrusion from the rest of the crowd and at insolence against city-form. In this
superconscious state individuals’ extrusion from the crowd continually amplifies the
conflict between the crowd and a city-form intended to streamline it—only to make
incoherence and malfunction increasingly acute (Akkerman, 2000). The bewildering
trait of the urban superconscious is that all attempts to escape it through extrusion
only guarantee its very perpetuation and intensification. Focused on urban
superstructures, automation and mechanization, twentieth century urban planning
had paid its own tribute to the ghost of the superconscious. Within the post-modern
urban context of spiraling incoherence it is precisely urban void that emerges as the
new sanctuary. The focus of urban planning in the twenty-first century ought to shift
from urban superstructures to the understanding of urban voids, places of urban
decay in particular, and of their contexts.

Urban Voids and City-Form

Twentieth century planning has been a culmination of the attempt, albeit
unacknowledged, to turn the city, or the planned city-form, into a Platonic Form.
This argument finds support not only in the correspondence between blueprints and
Platonic Forms, but also in the reluctance or inability to accept authentic void as a
constructive urban design element: neither Forms nor blueprints can assimilate void
as a focal reference. This is of no minor significance, since city-form carries with it
most commonplace impact upon an individual’s frame of mind. Twentieth century
city-form, in its lack of authentic urban void, has been instrumental in the
mechanization and automation of urban space, and with it, of human behavior.
Yet urban voids such as the agora of Classical Greece, and later the market place
of the medieval city, usually spontaneously and often inadvertently constituted piv-
otal points of their respective urban communities (Zucker, 1966, pp. 33–44, 66–84).
 214 A. Akkerman

With the entry of Henri IV into Paris in 1495, designed urban squares, on the other
hand, came to be aimed at surveillance, control and the display of might by
occasional military parades. Similarly, streets deliberately carved as conduits of
traffic, ever since the Renaissance, were intended as facilitators of efficiency and
urban clarity. The temporal concern in planned city-form has focused on
minimization of travel time, voids being assessed mainly by their potential as
conduits of traffic. A foundational temporal attribute of void, however, has been
overlooked. The temporal quality that is at the founding of void is silence; its
accompanying mental state often is self-reflection. Planned city-form has accounted
for none of these.
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Urban voids as public gardens in cities appeared for the first time with the Jardin
des Tuileries in Paris, thrown open by the mob in 1792, during the French
Revolution. The introduction of urban parks by Joseph Paxton in the nineteenth
century, in London in particular, came only to emphasize the disappearance of
natural wilderness due to urban growth and expansion.
Urban voids such as public parks and gardens, but also the manicured lawns or
gardens in the back- and front-yards of suburban subdivisions, are idioms of the
Myth of the Garden. Most or all of these voids are public or private expressions of
the craving for spontaneity and authenticity within the contemporary urban
environment, constrained by discipline and control, privacy and exclusion, security
and possession. Suburban yards hardly represent raw nature, much as they scarcely
embody genuine humanism, while natural wilderness in cities can only seldom hide,
and much less revert, the flight into suburbia of the middle-class away from the city’s
ostensibly open public spaces.
On the other side of the spectrum of urban voids, forsaken spaces in cities, as
wastelands and places of danger, have been always ignored, despised, feared and
marked for extinction. In modern urban planning of the late-nineteenth and
twentieth centuries derelict urban spaces were designated for eradication as a matter
of axiomatically presumed public interest. In this regard modern urban planning has
continued to perpetuate the Platonic myth of the Ideal City by clinging to
perfunctory stability and equilibrium, yet ignoring the dynamics of capriciousness
and serendipity. Voids in the city have been reduced to parking lots epitomizing
segregation of pedestrians, to urban parks as places of mutual exclusion of the
middle-class and the underclass, and to street in-fills casting urban voids as
mere gaps.
The question, whether—or if at all—city-form can be responsive to cravings for
human authenticity emanates directly from twentieth century Existentialism.
European Existentialism has been directly nurtured by the increasingly frequent
malfunction, orderlessness and the resulting absurdity of the city. For it is the
malfunctioning city itself, an offspring of the Myth of the Ideal, cum Rational City,
that possesses an unmitigated, authentic Dionysian disposition. The most vivid
locale where this occurs within the city is the place of urban decay.

Conclusion: Learning from Urban Decay

Urban decay, as the spatial manifestation of dysfunction in city-form, is a lesion left
behind by hasty urban growth and development, or in an oversight or disregard
 Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form 215

surfacing from a plan. Yet urban decay never emerges suddenly within city-form.
As the disparaging term suggests accurately, urban decay is a process. It evolves
within city-form as the complement of the urban superconscious: the reality of urban
decay is the counterpart of the Myth of the Ideal City (Akkerman, 2004).
As an opposite of the Ideal City, does urban decay, or urban void, represent the
mythical Garden? The paradigmatic Garden could be seen emerging in the built
environment since antiquity. The Garden of Epicurus was a school set in an Athens
arboretum that had its gates open to women and slaves alike (Strodach, 1963, p. 79).
During the early Roman Empire the Garden Myth was articulated as a conceptual
design scheme in one of three theatrical street scenes of Marcus Vitruvius Polio.
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The Vitruvian satiric street scene (as opposed to his comic and tragic scenes) was a
pastoral setting of people and decrepit dwellings in nature’s wilderness, picturing those
who lived outside cities—the rustic people. Later in the fifteenth century, Sebastiano
Serlio referred to the satiric scene as involving ‘dissolute and devil-may-care lives
[where] the corrupt and criminals were identified’ (Serlio, 1611/1982).
Within the contemporary metropolis, most closely corresponding to the satiric
scene are, precisely, places of urban decay. As disintegrating and hostile, disheveled
and desolate, the place of urban decay in the contemporary western metropolis has
been habitually ignored or—alternatively—marked for elimination. Yet, more than
any other facet of contemporary city-form, urban decay—a manifestation of the gap
between an urban blueprint of the past and its aftermath lingering into a present—
expresses urban time as a flowing continuum, both in its social and its physical
attributes.
The social qualities associated usually with places of urban decay are, much as in
Serlio’s satiric scene, poverty and crime. In the North-American metropolis this
relates often to inner-city areas where gentrification has not yet reached—sometimes
in places where people had lived for generations for lack of means to move to the
suburbs. In the city there could hardly be places more expressive of the passage of
time.
Auspiciously, urban subconscious has been said to be the ‘sum of physical
circumstances [. . .] and historical events, experienced collectively by a group of
people living for several generations in the same environment’ (de Bievre, 1995).
Reflecting upon the physical aspects of urban dysfunction and obliteration, urban
subconscious is also what the photographer Ryuji Miyamoto, in his Architectural
Apocalypse (1986), has called the decay of architecture disintegrating into ruins—
either by way of deliberate destruction, through planned urban growth and
modernization, or as a consequence of a natural disaster.
In contrast to fossilized emblems of past time in a museum piece or a heritage site,
or to the spatialized, solemn Form of the Ideal City, urban decay is the spontaneous,
inadvertent expression of urban change. Within contemporary city-form urban
decay is also an ever-present, ongoing veracity: the unplanned place, or the urban
void, the unintended aftermath of a plan. It is a spontaneous mark of defiance
against the enforcement of rationality and predictability in the city. Stripped of
pretension, the place of urban decay is a niche where city-form as a dynamic,
pre-rational entity wins over a plan. As the polar opposite to the Myth of the Ideal
City, the reality of urban decay gives rise to the re-emergence of the Garden Myth.
 216 A. Akkerman

In Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi et al. (1972) had shown the
significance of perceiving the urban Ugly, not as a quality to be judged or rallied
against, but as a process to be experienced and experimented upon. The biggest
challenge to urban design at the turn of the twenty-first century could be the task to
preserve change and to enshrine the passage of urban time. Rather than solely
crafting objects, something of a masculine trait, urban design can accomplish this by
focusing on voids in the city, by enabling people to experience them and to
experiment upon them. There ought to be in the city a designed expression to
recognition, respect and deference of voids and of the passage of time. Preservation
as well as deliberate crafting of urban voids and open places of silence within the city
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could be the worthiest challenge to urban design in the twenty-first century.

Notes
1
Cicero translated only two Platonic dialogues, the Protagoras and the Timaeus, and in the Timaeus
the only sections positively known as having been translated by him are 27d–47b. It is precisely in
these sections that Plato makes reference to a plan or a model (e.g. in Timaeus, 29b, 39e) and
intimates architectonic structure to the universe (Timaeus, 30a–33d, 35–37b). In the Timaeus
(25a–25d) Plato discusses also an ideal-city, the capital of the lost island Atlantis. The very term,
Form, in the presentation of Plato’s doctrine is due to Cicero’s translation, ‘forma’, of the Greek
words ‘idea’ or ‘eidos’ of Plato’s original Greek. The Latin ‘forma’ frequently refers to a
groundplan or a map (such as the extant Forma urbis Romae). Cicero, in his translation of Plato,
carefully follows the urban and architectural context of Plato’s philosophy, adhered to also in later
medieval religious interpretations of Plato (Powell, 1995, pp. 280–281).
2
Extending Plato’s doctrine, Thomas Aquinas, in Question I, Article 1c of his Random Topic
Questions refers to the term ‘Idea’ as consigned to a pattern, a blueprint or a plan, with the
intention to produce an external work (Aquinas, 1983).
3
As a reflection of the human psyche the Ideal City is a shared aspect of the human subconscious.
In terms of Jung’s psychology, Plato’s allegory of the Ideal City is an archetype. It is noteworthy, in
this regard, that with the exception of the Earthmother, Jung enlists anthropomorphic figures,
rather than environmental paradigms. The shared paradigms uncovered by Jung, which he refers to
as myths are: the Mother, the Old-Wise Man, the Child, the Hero, the Trickster, the Animal, God,
and Self. Many, if not all, of the archetypes emerge in folktales and fairytales. His archetype of the
Mother, or the Earthmother, seems to entail the Garden (or Nature), but curiously, neither the
Castle, nor the Citadel or the City, are among his paradigms.
4
Creation of the heavens and the earth, as told in Genesis 1 and 2, has some parallels with early
Greek views on the universe. In the cosmology of Anaxagoras (500–428 BCE) the primordial state
of the world was a confused mixture in a void; the cosmic Mind had discerned the different parts of
the primordial mixture and through rotation arranged them into a coherent world scheme.
5
Jung’s Earthmother, seems to echo Nietzsche’s ‘Primordial Mother’ (die Urmutter). In The Birth of
Tragedy Nietzsche writes: ‘That same nature addresses us through Dionysiac art and its tragic
symbolism, in a voice that rings authentic: ‘‘Be like me, the Original Mother (die Urmutter), who,
constantly creating, finds satisfaction in the turbulent flux of appearances!’’’ (Nitezsche, 1956,
p. 102).
6
The intent here, clearly, is not to the modern blueprint, as a technique developed by William
Herschel only in the nineteenth century. The very notion of a blueprint, as intended here, is a chart
or a diagram for a premeditated spatial configuration of objects. In such a broad sense, ancient or
medieval groundplans and architectural plans, the extant among them being the parchment
groundplan of the Monastery of St. Gall, or plan of the Hagia Sophia Church, correspond to the
notion of a blueprint.
7
The myth of the demiurge was introduced by Plato in the Timaeus (41a). The demiurge is the
cosmoplast, a cosmic designer that mitigates between the static universe of the Forms and the world
of daily experiences. The cosmogonic context of the demiurge had been anticipated by Anaxagoras
 Urban Void and the Deconstruction of Neo-Platonic City-Form 217

(c. 500–428 BCE) in his notion of cosmic Mind, and critiqued by Plato in Phaedo (97C–99D).
The demiurge figures in the early version of what came to be known as the Argument from Design
for the existence of God in Cicero’s De natura deorum, ii 34. In Plato’s ideal city the Grand
Designer parallels the philosopher-king, a representative of Plato’s guardian class (Naddaf, 1998,
p. xxxii).

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